Wednesday, 2 March 2011

Hiding the Homeless

There are a hundred and one reasons that are the trigger to people ending up homeless – relationship break-up, abusive parents, lose job … and almost always being made homeless is not directly the person’s fault, and certainly rarely by choice, but the result of a train of events that the rest of us will feel fortunate not to have experienced.

Well most of us but not the extremist Tories on Westminster council who have apparently decided being homeless is a crime. And they don’t stop there – they also want to make it a crime to help the homeless. The bylaw, should it go through, says it will become an offence to “sleep or lie down, deposit materials used as bedding” and to ”give out, or permit another to give out, food for free”.

And exactly just how do they think this will help the homeless to find a home? Will the jobless person go back to their former employer and get their job back simply by pointing out that otherwise they will be prosecuted? Does the young person who ran away because of the abuse they were suffereing at home have to go back for more?

What planet are these people on? What century do they belong to? Certainly not this planet nor this century! And if we are to believe anything at all that Cameron says the latter ‘offence’ goes against the very grain of his Big Society.

But of course I’m being oh so dumb & naïve. These Tories do not care in the slightest about the homeless. To them they are just an inconvenience making the streets of Westminster look untidy and this will put off the tourists. So this bylaw is the perfect solution.

There are no words to adequately describe how I feel about these Tory councillors, so I wont even try. I think the vast majority, if not all of you, will know where I’m coming from.